I. Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of document management, and more particularly, to a system and method for storing, organizing and accessing electronic (or digital) documents and paper documents.
II. Background
Prior to the introduction of the Internet, most important financial and legal documents were in paper form. As the use of the Internet became widespread and state, federal and some foreign country laws evidenced a trend towards permitting the use of digital documents as a substitute for paper documents for legal purposes, the creators of such documents began a trend of gradually increasing use of digital documents and decreasing the use of paper documents. In most cases, recipients of these documents also increasingly preferred receiving documents in digital form.
However, most individuals still receive and use important documents in both digital and paper form. In certain circumstances, documents like birth certificates, wills and death certificates must be in an original paper form in order to be considered legally valid. In other circumstances, such as in real estate transactions, the common commercial practice still demands paper documents. Finally, many people, especially older people, prefer and demand paper documents instead of digital documents.
The result is that individuals still receive their important documents in paper or digital form, and sometimes in both forms. This can cause difficulty in filing, organizing and locating these documents.
In the past, a common method to organizing documents was to print all documents received in digital form and file them in the physical file folders appropriately labeled, along with the documents originally received in paper form. However, as the trend towards digital documents continues to accelerate, this method has become less and less attractive.
The widespread access to scanning technology, smart phone picture-taking and transmission abilities, coupled with a significant reduction in the cost of digital storage, has enabled individuals and businesses to convert their paper documents into digital form and reverse the prior preferred method of converting the digital documents to paper form for organizing and storage purposes.
However, this method is incomplete and not reliable. It requires significant time and discipline for an individual to convert numerous paper documents to digital form. It requires considerable effort and thought to establish a computer-based filing system. Given the difficulty in determining into which category or categories a particular document might be placed, any ad hoc computerized system of document storage will be very dependent upon user-generated identifiers, such as document file names or placement into subfolders, for search and recovery purposes. Finding a document with a word search capability requires that scanned documents be converted into text, something that cannot only be expensive and time consuming, but is not completely reliable. Computers can crash, and unless the storing drive is backed up, documents can be lost. Further, computers, especially laptops, tablets or smart phones can be stolen, compromising the confidentiality of important documents.
Finally, as individuals become more mobile, possibly misplacing important files as they move their domiciles, and as health care and anti-terrorism laws and regulations make timely, and in some cases emergency, access to such documents important, such documents must be accessible quickly and from many locations.
Though there are organizations that provide hard drive backup services, such services fail to provide for the organization and quick search methods needed by an average computer user, and they do not provide a method to include the organization of paper documents into any such system.
Many organizations, such as insurance companies, offer their customers a secure, on-line view of their insurance policies. However, if a customer is insured by more than one company, the customer must access multiple websites to view all of his or her insurance policies. The necessity of accessing multiple websites and memorizing or storing multiple passwords significantly diminishes the usefulness of such sites for any purpose other than displaying the documents produced by such organization. There is no cross-website organization of all of the user's important documents.
Many financial institutions, including stock brokerage services, provide Internet access to customer accounts. However, a number of individuals are concerned that such institutions have the ability to change, or are vulnerable to malevolent computer hackers who can change, the current and prior statements. Further, many institutions, in an effort to use less paper and reduce mailing costs, encourage their clients to opt for digital statements, thereby eliminating a the potential for a hard copy to compare to prior digital statements. By storing an image of such statements in an account under his or her control, the individual has complete and unchangeable record of such statement, without the inconvenience of storing large volumes of paper statements accumulated over many years.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method to store and organize, and in some cases share, important, legal and financial documents in a secure and uncomplicated manner, in a single website, to have such method be easy for an average computer user to use, to include a search capability that is quick and efficient and not burdensome on the user, and to include a simple structure for including paper originals in such method and for identifying the location of paper originals, when needed.